HelixNotes is completely free, open source, with no bloat. Your notes should be yours.
So we made sure they are. https://helixnotes.com/
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I’ll wait a few months and then check in again.
It stores all metadata in YAML frontmatter and doesn’t cache in an SQLite blob? I bet that decision will be reversed pretty quickly once people try to migrate a 10k+ note collection and want to do operations like search immediately instead of scanning every file to build an in-memory cache.
You’re right that all metadata lives in markdown frontmatter, but it’s not uncached. The notes list also only reads around 2KB frontmatter, so it stays fast well past 10k notes. We do have some tweaks planned though to optimize this even further. This is a great suggestion, thank you!
It’ll take a lot for me to move from silverbullet.md but I’m always up for checking out alternatives : D
I’ll give this a spin tonight
Nice to see a Tauri app around here !
Seems quite good - I’ve tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I’d stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I’ve recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I’ve been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.
HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn’t work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.
The only thing I don’t like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven’t found a way to move it.
Great suggestion on the movable toolbar. This is definitely something we can add.
Sounds great, look forward to seeing that. After using it a bit more, another thing occurred to me - there’s no way to open arbitrary files. I don’t use MarkDown for “just notes” or “just one thing”, I keep markdown files all over the place. I had set the repository directory to be that of my blog posts during first run, but then I can’t open things in my notes directory or documents folder, and I can’t see anywhere in the settings dialogue to change it. Am I missing something?
Is this obsidian2?
I like obsidian
Without plugins system - no
Looks cool… but as an Obsidian user, i’m uncertain as to the depth of the differentiators. Open source sure, but obsidian has served me well and is lightning fast to open even with all core plug-ins enabled plus several community plug-ins. Nearly all of which are optional anyway.
Obsidian also has quite a moat in terms of third-party functionality enhancements with very feature rich examples like Xcalidraw.
They also offer an end to end encrypted synchronization service that works better than file based synchronization services like iCloud, and a publish service that also works well.
No casting of aspersions, but as a former fortune 500 decision-maker for enterprise software in the millions, I have a tendency to critically think about why X vs Y for my personal stack as well. Counterpoints welcome!
Please, please, add forgejo integration for sync provider.
Excellent. Thank you. But using an online AI provider to me seems against the stated goals. I know online is the preferred option for most people, but you should provide them alongside connecting to a local server.
It says it supports ollama (local)
AI Actions
Improve writing, summarize, translate. Runs locally with Ollama, or use your own API key. Your data stays yours.
Was AI used in the process of making this app, and if so, how? I have personal issues with using ‘vibe-coded’ software. This looks very, very nice, so I figured I’d ask.
Thanks for asking. Yes, we use AI as a tool in our workflow. The difference between our workflow and ‘vibe coding’ is that we can catch and fix problems. We’re not just shipping whatever an AI produces and hoping it works.
Not sure if you can answer this question, but I’ve tried Markdown in the past with Joplin and one of the issues I had with it was that the codeblocks don’t have a convenient copy button. It separates them out nicely but you still have to highlight to copy and paste.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but as far as I could tell, this seemed like a shortcoming of Markdown itself, but is that something helix is able to do? It’s the one thing that’s got me on AnyType over any other note app, but I’m heavily under utilizing it for what it could be good for.
im fine with quillpad
I still use Simple note.
While I’d prefer one that isn’t owned by the same people as WordPress and not sync to their cloud, it is open source and free. I figure it beats Google or MS notes, and don’t have to manage syncing all the files. No AI nonsense either (at least for now)
Easy for shopping lists and jotting stuff down, there’s an app for all the major OSs. I definitely don’t trust it for anything important or sensitive.
intriguing
Personally I’m comfortable on Notesnook and tbh I trust them more
Oh, hey, I saw your repo is stall for months and I thought your project go south. So you finally satisfied with your gui speed after rewritten? Good to see you make it, congrats. Already find a job? You should really design a good plugin sys with py, to expand more interactive data type. Let me know if you want to hear more.
